Christianity – Religious life

Précis is a skill which involves reducing a text to fewer words to obtain the gist or essential point. In a sense, an essay is a précis of all you know about a subject. Try a précis of the following extract from an interview with EP Sanders in 100 words.

With the modern appropriation of Paul, I feel like I’m stuck. Readers have been appropriating him into their own contexts since at least the Epistle of James (which misunderstood him!). The epistle says, in argument with Paul, “Faith without works is dead.”

But Paul was entirely in favour of good works. The works he had in mind, against which he was polemicizing in Galatians and Romans, were those works that make you Jewish and distinguished you from Gentiles.
 
 So, the author of James takes it that Paul is against works, i.e., good deeds. 
 
 Paul loved good deeds! He recommends them to people all the time. But if you take his statement, “righteousness by faith, not by works,” out of its context—the question whether or not Gentile converts need to be circumcised—if you take it out of that context and put it in another context, I always kind of shudder at this.

But it makes me go through life shuddering! I shudder when James does it, I shudder when Luther does it, I shudder when a more modern person than Luther does it. But I take these to be my own limits rather than the fault of everybody else.

Source: Journal of Philosophy and Scripture - Interview with EP Sanders, 2005

Suggested summary Both Luther and James misunderstand Paul by failing to read the context. Paul attacks the distinguishing marks of being Jewish – such as the ‘works’ of circumcision – and says they are irrelevant for salvation. He is very much in favour of ‘good works’ such as helping the poor, or loving your enemy.